Download or read book Relating Carol Shields s Essays and Fiction written by Nora Foster Stovel and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-01-01 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays explores celebrated Canadian author Carol Shields’s experimentation with the essay genre in relation to her fiction. Shields’s essays clarify her iconoclastic approach to rules of narrative and illuminate her revisionist policies, elucidating the development of her fiction, both novels and stories, as her writing gradually becomes more explicitly feminist, as well as more daringly postmodernist. The dozen essays by the eminent Canadianists included in this edition throw fresh light on Shields’s writing, inviting us to read it with new eyes by revealing how her essays reflect and refract the brilliance of her fiction. These essays read Shields’s fiction through the lens of her essays, including those contained in the recent Giardini edition, wherein the author explains the creative methodologies involved in her fiction and also offers specific advice to writers of fiction.
Download or read book Relating Carol Shields s Essays and Fiction written by Nora Foster Stovel and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This essay collection, written by a stellar group of Canadian literature specialists, is a love letter to the late Canadian writer Carol Shields, who died about twenty years ago. The essays revisit Shields's prolific career-short story writer, novelist, book reviewer, teacher and biographer-through the lens of her posthumous collection, Startle and Illuminate: Carol Shields on Writing (2016), edited by her daughter Anne Giardini and grandson Nicholas Giardini. The chapters are eclectic, both intimate and academic in tone, as they reflect different relationships with this beloved writer within our Can Lit circle-and beyond." -Laurie Kruk, Professor in English Studies, Nipissing University, Canada This collection of essays explores celebrated Canadian author Carol Shields's experimentation with the essay genre in relation to her novels and short stories. Shields's essays clarify her iconoclastic approach to rules of narrative and illuminate her revisionist policies, elucidating the development of her fiction, both novels and short stories, as her writing gradually becomes more explicitly feminist, as well as more daringly postmodernist. The dozen essays by the eminent Canadianists included in this edition throw fresh light on Shields's writing, inviting us to read it with new eyes, by revealing how her essays reflect and refract the brilliance of her fiction, both novels and stories, helping readers to comprehend her art. These essays read Shields's fiction through the lens of her essays, including those contained in the recent Giardini edition, wherein the author explains the creative methodologies involved in her fiction and also offers specific advice to writers of fiction. Nora Foster Stovel is a Professor Emerita of the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. She has published books and essays on Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence, Margaret Drabble, Carol Shields, Margaret Atwood, and Margaret Laurence, including Divining Margaret Laurence: A Study of Her Complete Writings. She currently holds a SSHRC Insight Grant for her program of research on Carol Shields. .
Download or read book The Collected Stories of Carol Shields written by Carol Shields and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-07-23 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carol Shields, the Pulitzer Prize-winner author of the novels Unless, The Stone Diaries and Larry’s Party was also a renowned short story writer. Now readers can enjoy all three of Carol Shields’s short story collections – Various Miracles, The Orange Fish and Dressing Up for the Carnival – in one volume, along with the previously unpublished story, “Segue,” her last. With an eye for the smallest of telling details – a woman applying her lipstick so “the shape of pale raspberry fits perfectly the face she knows by heart” – and a willingness to explore the most fundamental relationships and the wildest of coincidences, Shields illuminates the absurdities and miracles that grace all our lives. From a couple who experiences a world without weather, to the gentle humor of an elderly widow mowing her lawn while looking back on a life of passion, to a young woman abandoned by love and clinging to a “slender handrail of hope,” Shields’s enormous sympathy for her characters permeates her fiction. Playful, charming, acutely observed and generous of spirit, this collection of stories will delight and enchant Carol Shields fans everywhere. Excerpt from The Collected Stories of Carol Shields Let me say it: I am an aging woman of despairing good cheer — just look into the imaginary camera lens and watch me as I make the Sunday morning transaction over the bread, then the flowers, my straw tote from our recent holiday in Jamaica, my smile, my upturned sixty-seven-year-old voice, a voice so crying-out and clad with familiarity that, in fact, I can’t hear it anymore myself, thank God; my ears are blocked. Lately everything to do with my essence has become transparent, neutral: Good morning, Jane Sexton smiles to one and all (such a friendly, down-to-earth woman). “What a perfect fall day.” “What glorious blooms!” “Why Mr. Henning, this bread is still warm! Can this be true?”
Download or read book Carol Shields Narrative Hunger and the Possibilities of Fiction written by Dee Goertz and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning Canadian writer Carol Shields has garnered praise from scholars and an international audience of readers. Inspired by the quality and scope of Shields's work, Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction addresses her creative exploration of postmodernism. As the first thorough examination of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, this collection of essays establishes the groundwork for future studies of her oeuvre. The collection begins with a significant new essay from Shields herself, 'Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard,' perhaps her most substantial commentary upon her own aims as a writer. In addition, scholars from Canada, England, the United States, and Australia explore the complexity of Shields's work and her contributions to the genre of the novel. These lively essays reflect Shields's verve and her playful approach to today's sophisticated critical thinking. Among the topics are Shields's use of biography and autobiography, metafiction, popular romance, and symbolism. While the essays foreground the unreliability of language, and hence our inability to know one another or even ourselves, the contributors argue that Shields has taken a step beyond postmodernism by suggesting that we can transcend the limitations of its epistemology. Containing several essays on Swann and The Stone Diaries, Shields's most popular works, and the most extensive annotated bibliography available of works by and about Shields, this collection will appeal widely to scholars, students, and readers of Carol Shields and Canadian fiction.
Download or read book The Canadian Shields written by Carol Shields and published by Univ. of Manitoba Press. This book was released on 2024-09-09 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Newly discovered work by one of Canada’s favourite writers The Canadian Shields brings together fifty short writings by Carol Shields (1935–2003), including more than two dozen previously unpublished short stories and essays and two dozen essays previously published but never before collected. Invaluable to scholars and admirers of Shields’s work, the writings discovered in the National Library Archives by Nora Foster Stovel and presented to the public here for the first time reflect Shields’s interest in the relationships between reality and fiction, mothers and daughters, and gender and genre. They also reveal her love of Canada, especially Winnipeg, her home for twenty years. Originally written for women’s magazines, travel journals, convocation addresses, and even graduate school term papers, Shields’s imaginative essays explore ideas about home, Canadian literature, contemporary women’s writing, and the future of fiction. Whether autobiographical, cultural, or feminist in focus, these works vividly illuminate the multiple chapters of Shields’s writing life. Margaret Atwood and Lorna Crozier frame Shields’s texts with tributes to her work and impact. An introduction by Stovel situates Shields as a Canadian author and subversive feminist writer, demonstrating how American-born-and-raised Carol Anne Warner became “the Canadian Shields”—a quintessential and beloved Canadian writer and the only author to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General’s Gold Medal for Fiction.
Download or read book Carol Shields written by Neil K. Besner and published by Turnstone Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carol Shields: The Arts of a Writing Life is a rich collection of essays, memoirs and interviews, written by literary critics on both sides of the Atlantic, and by friends, former teachers, and family. It is edited and introduced by Neil K. Besner, and features a piece by Shields herself on what a writing life means to her. Discussions of all of Shields's works are presented, from her early fiction to her most recent, including her novels and collections of stories, poetry, drama, and nonfiction. The articles range generously in tone and style from the scholarly to the personal, with an essay on her mother by Carol's daughter Anne Giardini, pieces by writers who have worked with Carol, including Blanche Howard and Dave Williamson, and warm essays by friends of Carol's, such as Maggie Dwyer.
Download or read book Startle and Illuminate written by Carol Shields and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shimmering with her unique style, sense, humour, vision and wit, Startle and Illuminate is a book of advice and reflections on writing by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carol Shields that is destined to become as valued and essential as Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft and Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. An essential work from one of Canada's finest writers, Startle and Illuminate stands as a reflection of Carol Shields' devotion to the writer's craft. Drawn together by her daughter and grandson from decades of correspondence with other writers, essays, notes, comments, criticism and lectures, Startle and Illuminate helps answer some of the most fundamental questions about the craft: Why do we write at all? Can writing be taught? What keeps a reader turning the pages? How is a writer to know when a work is done? In her own words, Shields reveals her thoughts on why we read, and more importantly, why we write: for the joy of the making, to reimagine our world, to discover patterns and uncover forms that echo our realities as well as interrogate them.
Download or read book Carol Shields and the Writer Critic written by Brenda Beckman-Long and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2016-01-27 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout her literary and critical career, Canadian writer Carol Shields (1935–2003) resisted simple categorization. Her novels are elegant puzzles that confront the reader with the ambiguity of meaning and narrative, yet their position within Shields’ critical feminist project has, until now, been obscured. In Carol Shields and the Writer-Critic, Brenda Beckman-Long illuminates that project through the study of Shields’ extensive oeuvre, including her fiction and criticism. Beckman-Long brings depth to her analysis through close readings of six novels, including the award-winning The Stone Diaries. Elliptical, open-ended, and concerned with women writing about women, these novels reveal Shields’ critique of dominant masculine discourses and her deep engagement with the long tradition of women’s life writing. Beckman-Long’s original archival research attests to Shields’ preoccupation with the changing efforts of waves of feminist activism and writing. A much needed reappraisal of Shields’s innovative work, Carol Shields and the Writer-Critic contributes to the scholarship on life writing and autobiography, literary criticism, and feminist and critical theory.
Download or read book Unless written by Carol Shields and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-10-08 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Unless you’re lucky, unless you’re healthy, fertile, unless you’re loved and fed, unless you’re offered what others are offered, you go down in the darkness, down to despair.” Reta Winters has many reasons to be happy: Her three almost grown daughters. Her twenty-year relationship with their father. Her work translating the larger-than-life French intellectual and feminist Danielle Westerman. Her modest success with a novel of her own, and the clamour of her American publisher for a sequel. Then in the spring of her forty-fourth year, all the quiet satisfactions of her well-lived life disappear in a moment: her eldest daughter Norah suddenly runs from the family and ends up mute and begging on a Toronto street corner, with a hand-lettered sign reading GOODNESS around her neck. GOODNESS. With the inconceivable loss of her daughter like a lump in her throat, Reta tackles the mystery of this message. What in this world has broken Norah, and what could bring her back to the provisional safety of home? Reta’s wit is the weapon she most often brandishes as she kicks against the pricks that have brought her daughter down: Carol Shields brings us Reta’s voice in all its poignancy, outrage and droll humour. Piercing and sad, astute and evocative, full of tenderness and laughter, Unless will stand with The Stone Diaries in the canon of Carol Shields’s fiction.
Download or read book Carol Shields Narrative Hunger and the Possibilities of Fiction written by Ted Farrell and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning Canadian writer Carol Shields has garnered praise from scholars and an international audience of readers. Inspired by the quality and scope of Shields's work, Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction addresses her creative exploration of postmodernism. As the first thorough examination of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, this collection of essays establishes the groundwork for future studies of her oeuvre. The collection begins with a significant new essay from Shields herself, 'Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard,' perhaps her most substantial commentary upon her own aims as a writer. In addition, scholars from Canada, England, the United States, and Australia explore the complexity of Shields's work and her contributions to the genre of the novel. These lively essays reflect Shields's verve and her playful approach to today's sophisticated critical thinking. Among the topics are Shields's use of biography and autobiography, metafiction, popular romance, and symbolism. While the essays foreground the unreliability of language, and hence our inability to know one another or even ourselves, the contributors argue that Shields has taken a step beyond postmodernism by suggesting that we can transcend the limitations of its epistemology. Containing several essays on Swann and The Stone Diaries, Shields's most popular works, and the most extensive annotated bibliography available of works by and about Shields, this collection will appeal widely to scholars, students, and readers of Carol Shields and Canadian fiction.
Download or read book Carol Shields and the Extra Ordinary written by Marta Dvorak and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2007 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Claiming the "ordinary" and "extra-ordinary" as critical categories, contributors to this volume explore the philosophical and literary import of Carol Shields's writing, its complex play with genre and narrative technique, its re-valuing of domesticity and gendered perspective, and the social critique implicit in its gentle satirical impulses.
Download or read book The Worlds of Carol Shields written by David Staines and published by University of Ottawa Press. This book was released on 2014-12-02 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Carol was a very fine writer and a remarkable human being, a wonderful person whose work I closely followed for more than 20 years. I interviewed her frequently over those years, with virtually every work she produced —novel, radio drama, play, book of stories. So I had a good sense of the span of her work and also her evolution as a stylist. But the key reason I wanted to make a book focusing on her life and work is that we were friends." —Eleanor Wachtel This book strikes the right balance between intimate accounts and literary analysis. It opens with reminiscences by close friend Eleanor Wachtel, which are followed by a study of Shields’ poetry by her daughter and grandson, then by various aspects of her fiction, including a detailed examination of her plays. It closes with reminiscences by four close friends: Jane Urquhart, Joan Clark, Wayson Choy and Martin Levin. The 23 contributors offer new insights, new theories, and new perspectives about Shields’ illuminating career. Only one piece—her obituary written by Margaret Atwood—has been previously published.
Download or read book Collected Stories written by Carol Shields and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2010-07-29 with total page 19 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time all of Carol Shields’ remarkable short stories – some previously unpublished – are gathered together in one volume. ‘Carol Shields’ stories have given me happiness, not just pleasure’ Alice Munro
Download or read book The Collected Stories written by Carol Shields and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2005 with total page 19 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time all of Carol Shields' remarkable short stories -- some previously unpublished -- are gathered together in one paperback volume. In The Collected Stories we bring together Carol Shields' original short story volumesVarious Miracles, The Orange Fish and Dressing Up for the Carnival, some portions of which have never before been published in the UK. To these wonderful shorter fictions, we add a chapter from Carol Shields' last, unfinished, novel Segue, making this an essential and comprehensive overview of a brilliant writer. In all of these shorter works, Shields combines the dazzling virtuosity and wise maturity that she brought to so many readers in novels such as The Stone Diaries and Unless. With her exquisite eye for detail and her eagerness to explore the most fundamental of relationships and the wildest of coincidences, she illuminates the absurdities and miracles that grace all of our lives. Playful, charming, acutely observed and generous of spirit, this collection of stories will delight and enchant readers the world over.
Download or read book Liminal Spaces written by Alex Ramon and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-10-02 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive reassessment of the work of Carol Shields. Arguing against enduring conceptions of Shields’s fiction as celebratory domestic miniaturism, the study presents her work as more expansive and equivocal than has sometimes been recognised, reading her texts as “liminal spaces” situated on a series of formal and thematic borders. Close attention is paid to Shields’s stylistic experimentation, to her subversions of auto/biography and historiography, and to the significance of her critical writing, while works which have previously received very little analysis, such as her early poetry collections, are also examined. Intertextual links between Shields’s work and that of a range of other writers including Phillip Larkin, Iris Murdoch, Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood are identified and explored, and the study also draws extensively on manuscript materials which give an insight into Shields’s working methods and extend debate about her experiments with narrative perspective and genre-mixing.
Download or read book The Post Birthday World written by Lionel Shriver and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Complex and nervy, Shriver’s clever meditation will intrigue anyone who has ever wondered how things might have turned out had they followed, or ignored, a life-changing impulse.” — People (Critic's Choice) This dazzling novel from the Orange Prize–winning author of the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin takes a psychological and deeply human look at love and volition Does the course of life hinge on a single kiss? Whether the American expatriate Irena McGovern does or doesn’t lean into a certain pair of lips in London will determine whether she stays with her smart, disciplined, intellectual American partner Lawrence, or runs off with Ramsey—a wild, exuberant British snooker star the couple has known for years. Employing a parallel-universe structure, Shriver follows Irena’s life as it unfolds under the influence of two drastically different men. In a tour de force that, remarkably, has no villains, Shriver explores the implications, both large and small, of our choice of mate—a subject of timeless, universal fascination for both sexes.
Download or read book The Worlds of Carol Shields written by David Staines and published by University of Ottawa Press. This book was released on 2014-12-02 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Worlds of Carol Shields is the first book to examine Shields’ extraordinary career and life through the lens both of close friends and of literary critics.
